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Sometimes, just the name of a website is enough to make my heart sink. So, when my partner began reading out the name of a page that a mutual friend had ‘Liked’ on Facebook, I had an awful feeling of déjà vu: Spirit Science. As if to confirm my worst fears, the Welcome page includes this gem of wisdom:

Spirit Science is about the harmonic merging of things that previously we have believed did not fit together. Things such as “Spirit” and “Science”, perhaps “Democrats” and “Republicans”, or even all the way to Dance and Mathematics.

It’s not just the New Age claptrap or the USA-centric view of the world that disturbs me about this. My initial reaction was “how can anyone believe that there isn’t a link between Dance and Mathematics?”. My second reaction was “I understand the words and I understand the grammar, but do these sentences actually mean anything?”. What on earth is “harmonic merging”? It appears to have something to do with “the blending of Male and Female energies”. Okay, it’s now more than 40 years since I studied physics at school, but I don’t recall energy being gendered. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know about it, either, so it must be really cutting-edge knowledge. Never mind. The page our friend had ‘Liked’ was 10 Amazing Discoveries That Will Make You Question Everything. Bahkti had brought it to my attention because he thought that I ought to write something about it. The image at the top of the page shows the remains of the Antikythera Mechanism. That’s no bad thing. Showing people that the Classical world produced intricate gearing that could be put to use to make an orrery is good. If the list of “Amazing Discoveries” is going to be of this sort of object, then it could serve a useful purpose, even if it is embedded in a site stuffed to the brim with New Age nonsense. I should have known better.

Spirit Science’s “10 Amazing Discoveries That Will Make You Question Everything”

What are the true origins of humanity? There are so many ancient artifacts from the past that still perplex us today. How did ancient civilizations create such intricate and advanced technologies? There are so many mysteries surrounding humanities past that we are finally becoming aware of. There seems to be a lot more going on than meets the eye… Here is a list of some of the most amazing discovery’s to date! 1: The London Artifact

Leaving aside the appalling grammar, if the London Hammer is the author’s Number One “Amazing Discovery”, then I’m afraid that I hold out little hope for the rest of the list. So, bear with me while I deal with just the first two items in the list. I had hoped to be able to deal with all ten, but I have had only two days to do the necessary research and I would like to have some time at the weekend away from my computer screen and reading mostly nonsense!

1: The London Artifact

The so-called ‘London hammer’

“This artifact is speculated to be so extremely old that part of the wooden handle has turned to coal. Coal is known to take millions of years to form, so then how is this possible? How old could this strange artifact actually be?”. The short answer is “probably between 100 and 200 years”. How can I be so sure? Critics will say it’s my arrogance or my closed-minded refusal to accept evidence that goes against conventional views. Nonsense. It’s a nineteenth-century mason’s hammer, just like the one displayed on this page, albeit with a slightly longer head. We actually know a reasonable amount about the circumstances of discovery, too, which give the lie to the claim that “the wooden handle has turned to coal”. For one thing, even the most cursory glance at the photograph of the hammer shows that its handle is wooden and has definitely not turned to coal! Max Edmond Hahn (1897-1989) and Emma Zadie Hahn (née Pearl) (1899-1995), his wife, found it in June 1936 on the banks of Red Creek, south of their home in London (Texas, USA). According to some versions of the story, the discovery took place in 1934; sometimes, Max is called Frank, for reasons unknown. They picked up a rock nodule with a piece of wood sticking out from it, which they found odd. It was sitting on a ledge by a waterfall on the river, not attached to any of the solid rocks around it. There are several areas where small waterfalls exist on Red Creek, the closest being about 10 km south-west of London. Some time later (perhaps in 1946 or 1947), their son George (1921-2011) broke it open. Part of the broken nodule has survived and has an unfossilised mollusc shell partly embedded in it (photograph here). Inside the nodule was a metallic hammerhead, to which the wooden handle was attached. The hammer was clearly of recent manufacture.

A nineteenth-century mason’s hammer. The resemblance to the “London Artifact” is unmistakable. [Source]

That ought to have been the end of the story. A nineteenth-century quarryman or rockhound dropped a hammer near a waterfall on Red Creek. However, it came to the attention of the Young Earth creationist Carl Baugh (born 1936). It is unclear if Baugh was alerted to the hammer by an article by Walter Lang (1913-2004) in the Bible-Science Newsletter21 (6), 14, ‘Modern hammer in Silurian rocks’, or vice versa. Lang appears to be the first to claim that the hammer had been studied by metallurgists at a laboratory in Columbus. This has widely been taken to mean Battelle Memorial Institute, a claim directly rebutted in the February 1985 issue of Creation Ex Nihilo. According to Lang, the scientists “were convinced that the rock itself could not have been formed except where there was a great deal of water and pressure” and that the handle had been “partly coalified… under pressure with water and volcanic action”. If The Battelle Institute did not supply the data, where did Lang get the opinions? Might they have come from Baugh? Baugh runs the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose (Texas, USA), which opened in 1984 as the Creation Evidences Museum. The hammer was one of its principal exhibits from the outset; Baugh is believed to have purchased it in 1983. It was Baugh who dubbed it the “London Artifact”, which means that all claims using this term go back ultimately to his authority. He is widely regarded with scorn, even by other creationists, for his promotion of dubious and even fraudulent objects. Baugh has tried to use the hammer to show that rock could form in a very short time (like Young Earth creationists everywhere, he ridiculously attributes the formation of the geological column to the effects of Noah’s flood), that people at the time of Noah were skilled metallurgists and that the Ordovician rock from which he claimed it had come could not be anything like as old as science asserts. He continues to promote objects that have long since been debunked. This includes the London Hammer, about which the Creation/Evolution Journal (5 (1) (Winter 1985), 46-7) devoted two pages to a rebuttal of Baugh’s claims by the anthropologist John R Cole. This was in the year after his Museum opened, yet he ignored the criticism. The nodule in which the hammer is embedded is the real source of the claims of antiquity. If it is genuinely part of the local geology, then it potentially provides evidence either for the recent formation of the rocks – as Baugh would like – or it provides evidence for human (or human-like) technology in the very remote past indeed. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that the nodule was ever part of the bedrock (which, incidentally, is Cretaceous, not Ordovician in date). Remember, it was found on a ledge near a waterfall. This is the key to understanding the object. The nodule is not bedrock, but a concretion made from once dissolved carbonate minerals that precipitated out as the water evaporated. In other words, the nodule could easily be of nineteenth-century date. Instead, we see the claim for (relative) antiquity parroted on websites, sometimes with reference to a book by Hans-Joachim Zillmer, Darwin’s Mistake: Antediluvian Discoveries Prove Dinosaurs and Humans Co-existed (Frontier Publishing, 1998). Most of these sites call him simply Hans and then proceed to mangle his surname in ways that show a blatant disregard for copyright laws in their authors’ use of cut-and-past facilities. Zillmer makes a great play of the chemical composition of the hammerhead, reporting that it consists of “96.6% iron, 2.6% chlorine and 0.74% sulphur”; this is the analysis that is often wrongly attributed to the Battelle Memorial Institute. Those dependent on this unsourced analysis have tried to claim that this is an impossibly pure form of iron and that iron cannot be combined with chlorine. This claims are nonsense. For one thing, steel contains 98-99.8% iron, while many iron ores (such as biotite) or meteoritic iron naturally contain chlorine, so it’s not a question of adding it. Finally, the idea that the handle has turned to coal is just plan silly. It is quite visibly wood, although the ends apparently show a little carbonisation. Carbonisation is a process that can happen to vegetable matter, especially wood, on heating. It is not “partly coalified”. If anything, it’s on the way to becoming charcoal. No, the London “Artifact” is not an “Amazing Discovery That Will Make Me Question Everything”!

2: The Fuente Magna Bowl

Fuente Magna: a bowl with a cuneiform inscription, allegedly found in Bolivia [Source]

“This is one of the most controversial artifacts in South America. It is a large stone bowl, similar to a container for making libations, baptisms or for purification ceremonies. Found by a villager near Lake Titicaca, the engraved writing lining the bowl is thought to be Sumerian!”. If this is a genuine archaeological discovery, then it is potentially one of the most important ever discovered in the Americas, which would justify calling it “The Rosetta Stone of the Americas”. Its supposedly Sumerian cuneiform inscription would demonstrate contact between the Old and New worlds millennia before the Vikings. Fuente Magna, by the way, means “Great Source” and it is not clear that it is a placename. I wonder if it is a Spanish name for the bowl itself; in fact, some websites (obviously translated by an automated algorithm from Spanish) treat it as the name of the object.

The location of Hacienda Chúa, according to Bernardo Biados and Freddy Arce [Source]

The first thing to note is that we do not have a proper findspot for the bowl. It is supposed to have been found by a worker on the Chúa Hacienda, which belonged to a family named Manjon and is said to be 75-80 km from La Paz. According to Yuri Leveratto (Crónicas indígenas del Nuevo Mundo, second edition 2010, Lulu, page 55), the Chúa Hacienda lay on the northern side of Lake Titicaca. Websites describing the bowl sometimes refer to the findspot as an ex-Hacienda and sometimes capitalise it as CHUA, as if it is an acronym (such as for the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario de Albacete), which it is not. Reporting some research undertaken by Bernardo Biados (an “Independent Education Management Professional”) and Freddy Arce Helguero (a prominent Bolivian pseudoarchaeologiost, who died in 2011), who travelled to Chúa in 2000, no trace of the Manjon family could be found. However, an old man of 92, named Maximiliano, recognised the Fuente Magna bowl from a photograph. He called it el plato del chancho (“the pig bowl”), explaining that it had been used as a food-bowl for pigs until it was taken to the Museo de Metales Preciosos (also known as Museo del Oro) in 1960. The problem with this account is that it is based on the recollections of an old man whose full name is not recorded, made forty years after the event.

Unfortunately, this is as far as we can get: Google’s links containing Manjon, Chúa Hacienda and Bolivia almost all link to pages discussing the Fuente Magna bowl. None link to a Chúa Hacienda owned (or formerly owned) by a Manjon family in Bolivia. That is worrying, when we do not have a contemporary account of the bowl’s discovery and rely on the memories of an old man interviewed forty years after allegedly making his discovery. One has to question whether his recollections are correct: if he used it as a pig feeder, that suggests it was complete, yet we are told that it had to be “restored” (which seems to mean stuck back together) in 1960. This makes me wonder if Maximiliano’s plato del chancho was an entirely different vessel. Worse, the accounts of the discovery are contradictory. Many of them show tell-tale signs of being translated from a Spanish original by a computer program, perhaps Google Translate. The principal confusion is over the date, which is given variously as the 1950s, 1958 or 1960. Also, some writers claim that it is stone, others that it is ceramic. The bowl apparently first came to the attention of the archaeologist Max Portugal Zamora (1907-1984) some time after its discovery. Zamora was the director of the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia Tiwanaku in La Paz from 1936, where he became an expert on the archaeology of the Andean Altiplano and pre-Columbian parietal art. His published works (see the bibliography in his obituary) show no evidence for an interest in the bowl until 1975 (published as ‘La Fuente Magna’, Hoy (Suplemento L.P. 6 – VII), 8), although a number of websites assert that he “restored” the bowl in 1960. The recognition of cuneiform writing is attributed to Mario Montaño Aragón (born 1931), which he published in Raíces semíticas en la religiosidad aymará y kichua (Biblioteca Popular de Ultima Hora, 1979). The details of discovery appear to come directly from Aragón’s account (unless they come from Zamora’s paper, which I have not seen).

[Right side] (1) Girls take an oath to act justly (this) place. (2) (This is) a favorable oracle of the people. (3) Send forth a just divine decree. (4) The charm (the Fuente Magna) (is) full of Good. (5) The (Goddess) Nia is pure. (6) Take an oath (to her). (7) The Diviner. (8) The divine decree of Nia (is) , (9) to surround the people with Goodness/Gladness. (10) Value the people’s oracle. (11) The soul (to), (12) appear as a witness to the [Good that comes from faith in the Goddess Nia before] all mankind. [Left side] (1) Make a libation (this) place for water (seminal fluid?) and seek virtue. (2a) (This is) a great amulet/charm, (2b) (this) place of the people is a phenomenal area of the deity [Nia’s] power. (3) The soul (or breath of life). (4) Much incense, (5) to justly, (6) make the pure libation. (7) Capture the pure libation (/or Appear (here) as a witness to the pure libation). (8) Divine good in this phenomenal proximity of the deity’s power.

The Lord of Serenity with the light gathers and herds together the large animals and the goats and the kids (weakened by lack of fodder, or wandering in search of food) to the open fields for rest.

Marini suggests that “[i]n this context, “rest” appears to mean slaughter, for sacrifice or butchery, and to convert their hides to leather for apparel”.

Real proto-cuneiform: it’s very different from the “writing” on the Fuente Magna bowl [Source]

As with the question of the language, here we have two supposed authorities producing quite different translations, allegedly from the same original language. Again, both can’t be right (and I have a suspicion that neither is correct). Supporters of the bowl’s authenticity claim that it is evidence for transatlantic contacts before the Vikings. It sits alongside other supposed evidence, such as the (probably non-existent) Paraíba stone, the Newark “Holy Stones” and the Los Lunas inscription. What the supporters cannot agree on was the date of the hypothesised contact. Was it c 3000 BCE, as Clyde Winters would have it? Or was it in the middle of the first millennium BC, as Hugh Fox believed? Why is the rest of the iconography of the bowl like that of the Tiwanaku culture, about 600-950 CE? What can we make of this very confusing tale? For one thing, no Sumeriologist has accepted that the symbols on the interior of the bowl are “proto-Sumerian” (by which the authors promoting the Fuente Magna bowl presumable mean Sumerian hieroglyphs or proto-cuneiform). Indeed, these symbols seem to be part of the general iconography of the pre-Columbian Altiplano cultures and bear only the vaguest resemblance to Sumerian hieroglyphs. They seem real enough. It is the cuneiform that is the most worrying aspect. Despite Hugh Fox’s belief that the inscriptions are Phoenician, no examples of Phoenician cuneiform have been found farther west than Malta. By the time the Phoenicians established colonies in the western Mediterranean basin, they had given up cuneiform and were using an alphabet ancestral to all modern western scripts. And the cuneiform looks very wobbly. Real cuneiform is written in neat rows, not vague panels, as we see on the bowl. That is a feature of proto-cuneiform. It looks to have been executed by someone who has seen a cuneiform text and is attempting to copy it onto a surface that they have no skill in working. To put it bluntly, it looks like a fake. The bowl has also been a problem for debunkers. Most seem happy to dismiss it as a hoax having no provenance. This is a little unfair. Whatever we might think of the work of Bernardo Biados and Freddy Arce, they did actually travel to the alleged site of its discovery and interviewed the person who claimed to have found it. This is very different from asserting that “there is no provenience. None. Nada. Zilch. We have anecdotes of it being “discovered””. As we’ve seen, this isn’t quite the case. The provenance may not be secure, but there is at least a likely location. Discussion on Wikipedia that led to the deletion of a page dedicated to the bowl wrongly stated that the script was first said to be cuneiform in 1985, while Jason Colavito has wrongly claimed that “[n]o one paid attention to it until 2000”: we have seen that a book published in 1979 already made that claim. So, Spirit Science, your item number 2 is also not an “Amazing Discovery That Will Make Me Question Everything”

The lessons of these objects

The first thing I have learned (actually, had confirmed) is that the web is not a good source of information about controversial archaeological discoveries. The overwhelming majority of websites that discuss these objects simply repeat the same stories, often through the overuse of cutting-and-pasting. Actually finding something different, something that does not merely parrot the original outlandish claims can take a lot of hard work. I have spent the best part of two days to write this post, which I originally believed I could do in a couple of hours. However, it has been worth it, even if I haven’t achieved my target of dealing with all ten items in Spirit Science’s laughable list of Amazing Discoveries That Will Make You Question Everything. To make matters worse, an increasing number of claims come from YouTube videos. Indeed, one is the source of Spirit Science’s silly page. It was posted on 8 October 2012, so I wonder why it took Spirit Science so long to mine it for (mis)information. Spirit Science concludes by saying:

Do you think discoveries like these should be discussed in schools more openly? When we can see the value in showing all angles of humanities past – then we can collectively put the puzzle pieces of Earth’s past together.

[The strange grammar and spellings are in the original]. I am appalled at the laziness of those who repeat the claims about these items. They seem content to trust what any anti-establishment source tells them and yet they are the people who accuse debunkers of being closed minded. Just look at some of the comments posted to Spirit Science’s page or the YouTube video. They are the ones who cannot see that their gurus are leading them astray, that the information they are being given is at best dubious, at worst, fraudulent. They seem incapable of critical thinking. The debunkers are often not much better, I’m ashamed to say. Putting in the time and effort to research objects of dubious provenance and authenticity may be a waste of time, when it’s far simpler just to say “hoax!” and hope that people will believe you. I am often criticised in comments on the main site for not providing all the detail necessary to show an objector that the conventional interpretation of site is correct. Even when I do, they don’t want to know, or will change tack to question something else that I’ve written. Perhaps I am wasting my time. On the other hand, given the sheer numbers of sites that make wrong claims about the past, I feel duty bound to provide a voice of reason. If I am able to correct at least one person’s misconceptions, then I hope that my efforts are worthwhile.

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…on myriad themes, including – but, not limited to – ancient Rome to cats (especially THEO!) to "The Walking Dead" to Amsterdam to atheism to hockey to "Everybody Loves Raymond" to "Les Mis" and almost ALWAYS quotes Emerson!